Don Quixote and the Green Army: Lessons from Australian Environmental Workfare

Australia’s unique history of national environmental youth workfare programs over three decades offers insight into youth work responses to climate change. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s use of ‘hysteresis’ and the ‘Don Quixote Effect’, this paper presents three key findings from research conducted in the wake of the most recent incarnation of these programs, the Australian Government’s Green Army. As the final Green Army projects were being delivered, interviews and focus groups were independently conducted with former team members and supervisors who had exited the program and its predecessors. The Green Army was presented for political purposes as action against climate change despite no specific climate mitigation outcomes being identified. Supervisors, predominantly trained in the environmental sciences, given charge of teams of young workers, reported the double binds from the competing fields of ecological work and social work. Team members, faced with resistance to their efforts, reconciled their situation with a ‘double language of disinterest’. The analysis of their accounts illuminates potential challenges facing the future for young people and for youth work.